Distinguishing Convergent and Divergent Styles for Creative Thinking

Convergent and divergent thinking are two broad cognitive styles that are useful for appreciating how you approach creative thinking activities. If you’re a convergent thinker, you’ll tend to take a steady approach to tasks, whereas if you’re a divergent thinker, you can appear more obviously creative, especially when confronted with tasks that require lots of idea generation.

However, convergent thinkers often produce high-quality results through persistence, and divergent thinkers frequently discard a high proportion of ideas generated early on in a task. One style isn’t better than the other – they’re just different strategies.

Convergent Thinking

Divergent Thinking

Linear style of thinking

Lateral style of thinking

Fact based

Eclectic

Solution focus

Open ended

Logical approach

Stream of thought

Steady idea generation

Rapid idea generation

Conventional

Unconventional

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